Devise and Conquer: We Are Proud to Present..., reviewed.
Chris Klimek
Peter Howard, Holly Twyford, and Dawn Ursula in We Are Proud to Present...
I can't think of another time I've had as visceral and angry a reaction to a play as I did to Jackie Sibblies Drury's We Are Proud to Present. It takes a lot of gall to sit down with the intent of illuminating a little-known genocide and then decide, at some point during the writing process, to make it all about you.
Profiles of the playwright in the New York Times and the Washington Post cover this. I still kind of want to see the zombie play mentioned in the Times piece, but its revelation that she puts emoticons in her stage directions is unsurprising in light of the clumsiness of We Are Proud, wherein Drury chooses a hacky, wrongheaded premise and then executes it in a way that devolves from merely dull to actually loathsome.
My review of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company's production is in today's Washington City Paper, along with a review of Spooky Action Theatre's local premiere of Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodrigues's surreal 1943 play The Wedding Dress.